Movie blog — Late Fame (2025): Rediscovery, Bohemia and the Quiet Price of Attention.
There’s something deliciously melancholy about a film that asks whether being “discovered” later in life is a blessing or a kind of theft. Late Fame, Kent Jones’s gently rueful adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, lands somewhere in that moral gray zone: it’s a small New York fable about an overlooked poet who is suddenly (and a little dubiously) anointed as a genius by a scrappy group of young devotees. The movie isn’t trying to be a big idea-picture; it’s a slice-of-life parable about attention economies, artistic authenticity, and how cities make and unmake reputations. If you love character work, layered performances, and a film that breathes New York air, this one will reward the patient viewer.
Quick facts (so you can quote me later).
- Director: Kent Jones.
- Writer: Samy Burch (screenplay, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella).
- Running time: 96 minutes.
- Premieres / festivals: World premiere in the Orizzonti section at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival (August 30, 2025); also set for the New York Film Festival.
- Principal cast: Willem Dafoe (Ed Saxberger), Greta Lee (Gloria), Edmund Donovan (Meyers), plus Jake Lacy, Tony Torn, Clark Johnson and a handful of supporting players.
Those are the nuts-and-bolts — now let’s get to the part where the movie actually matters.
How many cast members — and who carries the picture?
Credit rolls and press materials show a compact ensemble: the film foregrounds roughly a dozen credited performers with narrative importance, while several smaller roles flesh out the bohemian salon and the city’s everyday texture. The names you’ll see in most coverage are Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee and Edmund Donovan — they supply the majority of screen time and the emotional confrontation. Beyond them, a handful of other actors (Jake Lacy, Tony Torn, Clark Johnson and a few younger ensemble members) populate the Enthusiasm Society and the postal-life background that grounds Ed Saxberger’s daily existence. In practical terms, the film functions as an intimate ensemble of roughly 10–15 meaningful characters rather than a sprawling crowd piece.
As for who “carries” the film: it’s Willem Dafoe’s movie in every possible sense. He plays Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York poet and postal-service employee whose modest life is upended when enthusiastic young fans rediscover his neglected book of poems. The story is told through his eyes — his bewilderment, amusement, vanity and vulnerability — and Dafoe’s performance supplies the film’s emotional gravity. Greta Lee’s Gloria and Edmund Donovan’s Meyers supply the generational counterpoints — the agitators of attention — but Saxberger is the means character, the center whose choices shape what the film means.
Box office / release reality — modest, festival-first, word-of-mouth-driven.
Late Fame is not a wide-release tentpole. It premiered on the festival circuit (Venice, New York Film Festival) and is shaped for art-house life rather than mass multiplex consumption. That means “box-collection” in the conventional blockbuster sense isn’t the right metric: the film’s commercial afterlife will come from limited theatrical engagements, festival buzz, critical word of mouth and — later — streaming or specialty distribution deals. Festival reviews have been warm: critics favored Dafoe’s performance and Jones’s attentive direction, which will help the film find its audience in specialty cinemas and streaming windows. If you’re hunting for a dollar figure, industry databases haven’t turned Late Fame into a numbers story yet — the movie’s value is reputational, not headline-box-office.
(Short version: this isn’t meant to be a crowd-pleaser that banks hundreds of millions — it’s a small, actor-and-text-driven film that lives at festivals and in quiet theatres.)
The niche — what kind of movie is Late Fame?
Think of Late Fame as a New York literary drama / character study with a satirical edge. It sits in the same cinematic neighborhood as films that investigate urban bohemia and the mystique of the artist — works that worry at authenticity, attention, and the rites of literary initiation. Director Kent Jones, who knows the city and its cultural ecosystems intimately, treats the film as a fable about how younger artists reconstitute elder ones for their purposes: reviving a forgotten poet becomes part reverence, part vanity, part social capital. The Late Fame movie appeals to viewers who like small, literate dramas, actor showcases, and films that ask what we owe creators once recognition arrives late.
Plot in plain English (no spoilers, then the deeper analysis).
At heart the plot is simple and quiet: Ed Saxberger lives a modest life — he works at the post office, he writes when he can, and his single volume of poetry has been mostly ignored for decades. One night, a giddy admirer from the city shows up, and before long Ed is welcomed into a salon of young, hungry artists who cast him as their retro-bohemian patron saint. They call him a rediscovered genius. He’s flattered, he writes again, and he’s drawn into the thrill of being seen. The Late Fame film then watches, with a light but precise scalpel, how new attention changes a person. Is it a second life, or a role performed for the applause? Is the group’s adoration authentic? And how does a man who dreamed, then was forgotten, survive being loved on terms that may not be his own?
Now the deeper layer: Jones adapts Schnitzler’s late-19th-century novella and transposes it into contemporary Manhattan. That temporal shift matters — the poetics of nineteenth-century Europe become the hip literariness of downtown galleries and MFA micro-scenes. The film resists turning its premise into an outrageously ironic satire; instead it keeps a tender center. Dafoe’s Saxberger is neither a saint nor a fool — he’s a man reclaiming an identity he thought was lost, and Jones allows him dignity even as he flirts with vanity. The younger characters (led by Greta Lee’s mercurial Gloria and Edmund Donovan’s earnest Meyers) are drawn with enough complexity that the movie avoids caricature: they are hungry, sometimes callous, often sincere.
Performances & what makes the Late Fame film sing.
The Late Fame movie lives and breathes on the caliber of its acting. Willem Dafoe plays Ed with a late-life fragility that never tips into parody: there’s grace in how he inhabits small gestures (a cigarette, a pause, the way he listens). Greta Lee’s Gloria is magnetic and a little dangerous — she’s the group’s tragic heroine, the one who both charms and tests Ed. Edmund Donovan’s Meyers serves as the ideological engine, the pushy evangelist who can’t help but manufacture meaning for others. Critics have been quick to single out Dafoe for what they call a “natural” performance — low-key but magnetically present — and reviews out of Venice and New York praise the three leads for keeping the film tethered to human complexity.
From a craft perspective, Kent Jones (a longtime critic and filmmaker) stages scenes with a warm economy: there are no needless flourishes, just patient frames that let conversations land. The cinematography and the quieter score choose texture over showmanship, which is exactly the right approach for a movie about the subtleties of being seen.
Themes & why the movie resonates now.
A few of the central themes the film teases out:
- The economy of attention. In a world where recognition can be manufactured by taste-makers and social groups, what does late recognition buy you, and at what price? Late Fame probes whether freshness is more valuable than years of quiet labor, and whether rediscovery is a gift or a re-inscription.
- Intergenerational theatricality. The young artists rehearse bohemian roles — they perform reverence as a way to perform their own identity. The film asks whether this form of theatricality is exploitative, loving, or both.
- Authenticity vs performance. Ed is both genuine and susceptible to performance. The Late Fame movie resists tidy moralizing; instead it watches how identity can be borrowed, amplified, and reshaped by attention.
- The city as character. Manhattan isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a participant. Jones uses the city’s social scenes (post offices, bars, tiny apartments) to show how communities produce and consume reputations.
Where Late Fame stumbles (if it does).
If the Late Fame film has any weaknesses, they’re modest and mainly about scale: because Jones opts for restraint, some viewers may find the narrative’s moral questions under-argued (the film prefers mood and nuance over overt thesis). A few critics wished the ending pushed harder against the dynamics it presents; others wanted more friction or consequences when the social circle’s contradictions grow visible. But those are quibbles in a film that by design is quiet and observant rather than overtly polemical.
Final verdict — who should see it and why.
Late Fame is for people who like small, literate movies about art and aging — films that think about what recognition does to a life rather than merely charting the glitter of success. It’s a Dafoe vehicle, sure, but it’s also a kindly, sometimes sly meditation on how we build cultural capital in private and public. If you enjoy films that reward attention rather than spectacle, this is a gentle, well-acted delight.
Go if you want: a film that feels like a late-night conversation in an apartment full of books; a movie that asks you to consider how fame lands when it comes long after the work was done. Don’t expect fireworks — expect a close, human study of the costs and comforts of being seen.
